Medieval Dress,Identity and Fashion

Medieval Dress,Identity and Fashion

with Professor Gale Owen-Crocker

(University of Manchester)

at Sutton Hoo, Saturday, 6th June, 2015.

Provisional Programme

09.50 – 10.15: Coffee on arrival

10.15 – 11.15: Medieval dress, identity and fashion – Our opening session will include a rapid chronological survey from Anglo-Saxon to late medieval dress, consider how dress functioned as an indicator of gender, status, ethnicity and discuss the concept of ‘fashion’ and when it began.

11.15 – 11.40: Coffee break

11.40 – 12.40: Fibres and techniques – We shall consider the materials from which medieval textiles were made and discuss the evolution of technology and processes throughout the Middle Ages.

12.40 – 13.45: Lunch break

13.45 – 14.35: Dress in the Bayeux Tapestry – We shall see how costume is used as a signifier in this most famous of medieval artworks and discuss how far it can be trusted as evidence of ‘real’ eleventh-century clothing.

14.35 – 14.55: Tea break

14.55 – 15.45: Sartorial splendour – We will focus on the use of gold and silk in dress, homing in on individual examples which still survive.

c.15.45: Thanks and Close

About Gale Owen-Crocker

Gale R. Owen-Crocker BA, PhD, FSA was Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at The University of Manchester, and Director of MANCASS, (the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies) until her recent retirement. She specialises in interdisciplinary Anglo-Saxon research, and medieval dress/textiles.

She was Director of a 5-year AHRC-funded Research Project ‘The lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c. 700-1450: origins, identification, contexts and change’ producing a searchable database of medieval dress/textile terms in all languages of the British Isles, a subject-related multilingual dictionary; and Co-Investigator of a 3-year Leverhulme-funded Project ‘Medieval dress and textile vocabulary in unpublished sources’. As chief editor of An Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c.450-1450 she led a team of distinguished scholars towards a substantial publication in 2012. She co-founded and co-edits the international, cross-disciplinary journal

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Summer Programme:

The Court at Sutton Hoo is still closed for the refurbishment works. We had hoped to find other venues to run the Study Days in the interim, however that has not proved possible so we are assuming that the Study Days will restart again in the Court in September. We are planning an exciting set of topics and speakers. Apologies for the long gap.